Failure in Iraq: I Blame It on Britney

Conservative attempts to blame the American people for the failure of the mission in Iraq are making Talking Points Memo sick.

Take it easy, Josh Marshall. It's not like the right-wing isn't nauseating about most issues. Have you ever checked out David Brooks' justification of CEO pay?

Personally, I blame the failure of the war on Britney Spears. The core of Bush's strategy on the home front was to keep the American people from paying attention. That's why the Bush administration put so much emphasis on shoring up consumer culture, cutting taxes, not instituting a draft, and not talking about "shared sacrifice." Why would people pay attention if they had no connection to the war?

Britney Spears, the uber-face of 21st century America, was the key to the success of this strategy. Personally appearing on every tv show, posing for every page of every magazine, and singing in every gin joint from the Florida Keys to Walla Walla, Spears was completely devoted to keeping the eyes of the American people on her, not on the war.

But then, Britney seemed to lose focus. She started seeing Kevin Federline, got married, became pregnant twice, and start having babies. Millions of people still adored Britney, but it wasn't the hundreds of millions needed to distract the American public from the war.

That's when the Bush administration got in trouble. Without Britney at top form, the public began to look at the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. In fact, you can trace the big decline in Bush's approval ratings to the beginning of the relationship between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline.

Of course, Britney did not become a complete traitor. She separated from Kevin at the personal request of the President. However, it was too late to save the Republicans in the mid-term elections and perhaps too late to save the war as a whole. Now that she's dumped Federline, Britney's trying to get the old mojo back. She's teamed with the powerhouse duo of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to ensure that's she is visible every day and recent reports have all three allowing the paparazzi to get crotch shots of her without underwear. (What sacrifices these women make for the good of the country!) But nobody seems interested anymore.

If you want to know why the war has failed, the answer is simple. Blame Britney.